Rockley Photonics Holdings Limited (RKLY)

Rockley Photonics developed silicon photonics chips and modules for sensing. Its main goal was a wrist-worn spectroscopy platform that could monitor body signals such as hydration, core temperature, blood pressure, lactate, and glucose trends without a needle. The company also licensed its photonics technology for data communications and worked with consumer-electronics customers on wearables. It operated mainly from Pasadena, California, and Oxford, England, with engineering staff in several countries.

Andrew Rickman, who had earlier founded the silicon photonics pioneer Bookham, started Rockley in 2013. The company raised several rounds of private funding and gained a major smartphone and wearables maker as its largest customer. In 2021 it agreed to go public by merging with SC Health Corporation, a blank-check company. The merger closed in August 2021, and Rockley shares began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under RKLY.

Life as a public company was hard. Rockley was still in development, burned cash quickly, and was hit by the 2022 sell-off in pre-revenue technology stocks. It raised money through convertible notes and an equity line of credit, cut staff, and lost its biggest customer relationship, while the share price fell far below the SPAC price of $10.

On January 23, 2023, Rockley filed a prepackaged Chapter 11 case in the United States together with provisional liquidation proceedings in the Cayman Islands, backed by a group of its noteholders. The NYSE suspended trading the next day and began delisting the shares. Under the restructuring plan the noteholders took ownership, the public equity was cancelled, and Rockley kept operating as a private company.